Florida State Seminoles

[eCat]

on top of that, both him and Comey are borderline blackmail by suggesting they have notes to release if they get burned.

Either you release the notes or don't but do it because its the right thing to do, it has nothing to do with whether you keep your pension or not you piece of shit

[Professor Tiger]

So let me get this straight; Comey and McCabe both worked in the same FBI/DOJ that Mueller did. Probably all down the hall from each other. Good Lord, Mueller has been conducting his little snipe hunt for almost a year, and he STILL doesn’t already have everything that his BFF’s Comey and McCabe have on this mythical case of Trump-Russia collusion? What HAS Lurch been doing all these months with all those millions of dollars?

What a scam this all is...

[10ac]

Looks like "Plan B" isn't working out too well.

[Professor Tiger]

https://www.target.com/p/plan-b-one-ste ... lsrc=aw.ds

[DooKSucks]

So let me get this straight; Comey and McCabe both worked in the same FBI/DOJ that Mueller did. Probably all down the hall from each other. Good Lord, Mueller has been conducting his little snipe hunt for almost a year, and he STILL doesn’t already have everything that his BFF’s Comey and McCabe have on this mythical case of Trump-Russia collusion? What HAS Lurch been doing all these months with all those millions of dollars?

What a scam this all is...

Investigations can take years. Watergate wasn’t a short investigation...

[eCat]

Good read in the Guardian about how a 27 year old created over 200 million profiles from facebook users and then packaged them up - which led to the Russians pretending to be oil companies and buying them.


https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/m ... nnon-trump

[Professor Tiger]

Investigations can take years. Watergate wasn’t a short investigation...

May 19,1973 Archibald Cox appointed Special Prosecutor of Watergate investigation.
August 9, 1974 Nixon Resigns.
Duration: 447 days.

May 17, 2017 Robert Mueller appointed Special Counsel of Trump-Russia investigation.
March 18, today.
Duration so far: 305 days.

I'm taking bets that 142 days from now - the milestone when Cox and Jaworsky had amassed mountains of evidence and ran Nixon out of office - Mueller will STILL be frantically searching for the first shred of evidence that Trump colluded with Russia.

[eCat]

I have a feeling Mueller investigation will end at or around the mid term elections

[Professor Tiger]

I agree. The 2022 midterm elections. Maybe 2026. He'll need that time to go through Stormy Daniel's billing records, looking for Russian surnames.

[eCat]

I've been watching a series on Netflix called Dirty Money. Its kind of like watching a 60 minutes piece but instead of it being 10 minutes its an hour.

Stories have been on the Maple Syrup Federation in Canada, Drug company Valeant, USB bank and a few others.

The one I watched last night, which I thought would be the least interesting was about a guy named Scott Tucker.

Tucker and his brother in the late 80s/early 90's started out with small payday loan company that had a handful of employees. They made good money but were largely localized because of state laws against loan practices. Then the internet came and they started advertising in states that allowed it which made his revenue explode. He still wasn't satisfied with that so he figured out a way to enter into the loan company business in every state - and that was having Indian reservation companies "own" his multiple payday loan business because they had sovereign nation status excluding them from local state law enforcement.

His business model was to provide quick and easy loans to people who needed them and give them misleading Truth in Lending information , for example the most common loan amount was for $300 and they'd have this simple breakdown that said you'd borrow $300, you'd be assessed a $90 loan processing fee and the amount you paid back was $390. They would take that $390 over the course of 4 months and you'd pay them $90 a month and in the 5th month the person would think they'd owe $30.

However in the 5th month they'd get hit with a $140 fee. The fine print on the loan said that if you didn't "arrange" with them a way to pay the loan directly in the first month, then the $90 was a renewal fee and the terms of the loan were reset for another month, meaning you didn't add anything to principle. And because these people provided this information, the money was taken directly from their bank account with no ability to stop it. The total payoff was $910 for the $300 loan

He amassed a personal fortune of over $400 million dollars from doing this, the Indian reservations made about $40m and he ended up with a staff of over 1400 people who were essentially bill collectors.

They were given papers each morning that had local details about the cities the Indian reservations were in such as the weather and they were told to never tell anyone where they were located at (Kansas City) and make them think they were located in the states where the Indian reservations were.

One woman , after missing her car payment with insufficient funds looked into the ownership structure and knew enough that this loan company wasn't authorized to give loans in the state she lived, so she called the state A.G. and he acted on it , which started them uncovering all layers.

In the end Tucker was adamant that although he was a scumbag (reporter: do you consider yourself moral? Tucker: I am a business man) he did not break the law. The feds hit him up with racketeering - what they use on the mafia. His brother killed himself in the parking lot of their business, he and his lawyer saw all their assets seized to the point he had get a court appointed attorney. He ended up getting sentenced to 14 years in jail.

and while what he did was horrible, I'm still not sure he broke any laws.

[eCat]

the one thing I'm struck with most here is, if you have a morally questionable fortune and one that could possible get you into legal trouble, take a play from the mexican drug cartels and bury $50m in a field somewhere that you can buy lawyers and live off of if all your stuff is taken away by the government.

[aTm]

It was really annoying to me how everyone interviewed was perfectly willing to send him to jail because of the loans as justification, but the loans arent illegal, werent why he went to jail, and other companies are still doing the same thing (includibg the same indians he was working with before).

[aTm]

The juxtaposition between what happened to him vs what happened to HSBC is kinda scary.

[eCat]

I was going to read up on him this morning and find out what the media was saying about this

[Saint]

There was a great story about him on longform.com website a few months ago

[eCat]

It was really annoying to me how everyone interviewed was perfectly willing to send him to jail because of the loans as justification, but the loans arent illegal, werent why he went to jail, and other companies are still doing the same thing (includibg the same indians he was working with before).

similar to Martin Shkreli - he went to jail for embezzlement and the price of this drugs are still jacked 750% over what they were

while I'm a big supporter of limited government and market forces determining price, there has to be rules about drug pricing that keeps people alive or greatly enhances their quality of life.

[hedge]

Why?

[eCat]

are you asking why should the government get involved in putting a price ceiling on life saving drugs?

[AlabamAlum]

In the early 1990's, Hillary Clinton made something like that for vaccines in that she had price controls set. Companies just stopped making them because the potential for medmal/allergic reaction lawsuits chipped away at the ROI to a point where it just wasn't worth it. We started paying for vaccines made overseas to meet demand - often at more than what the prices were before HRC got involved.

Do some Big Pharma take advantage? No doubt, but the fact remains we still have to provide them sufficient compensation to keep the drug inventions coming. A lot of money is spent on R&D, ongoing testing, lawsuit defense, and provider/patient education. Reduce the margins enough and it stymies production and innovation.

[eCat]

we're talking about established drugs that had prices low prices for decades and now cost a small fortune like Syprine.

Also, these guys were actually dropping the investment in R&D because buying up existing off patent drugs and then jacking the prices was more profitable

There is no justification for that kind of behavior.

I get the whole you have to let us make up for our R&D. $100K for cancer drugs is not part of that equation.

If a pharmaceutical company wants to stop R&D because margins are tight, then they are slashing their wrists because the other side of the coin is not letting them extend patent copyrights to avoid the creation of generics, allowing importation of drugs from foreign markets and utilizing group buying to reduce prices - all of which are currently protected by the government.